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Suites t« #nrtal Wavk 

January, 1916 


Number 9 







PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 



A PAPER SUBMITTED IN SECTION VIII, PUBLIC 

HEALTH AND MEDICAL SCIENCE, OF THE 

SECOND PAN-AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC 

CONGRESS: WASHINGTON, 

DECEMBER, 1915 



BY 

EDWARD T. DEVINE 



Price: ten cents 



UNITED CHARITIES BUILDING 



NEW YORK CITY 

Collected set- 



^3 



Copyright, 1916, by 
The New York School of Philanthropy 



Gift 
Institution 

APR IP W 



PAUPERISM 

Legally, in England and in countries which have fol- 
lowed English usage, pauperism, as distinguished from 
poverty, consists merely in the habitual receipt of official 
public relief. 

Etymologically, the word is derived from the Latin 
^pauper, meaning, as in its modern French and Spanish 
equivalents [pauvre, pobre], simply poor, without means 
of support; but when pushed farther back to its Latin 
and Greek origins [paucus, Gk. irav] pario, Gk. too] the 
word signifies not indigence but inefficiency. Making 
little, rather than needing much, is its original suggestion. 
The pauper is thus not one who from sudden, unfore- 
seen misfortune is reduced to need, even if that need is 
to be supplied by public relief, but one who brings forth 
little or nothing, the incapable^ the non-producer. 

Economically, pauperism describes the state of the 
social debtor, the one who is carried as a burden on 
industry and does not himself take any effective part 
in the production of wealth. 

Biologically, pauperism represents a primitive type, 
surviving in the struggle for existence only by parasit- 
ism, or a pathological type, emerging from abnormal 
environment. 

Sociologically, the pauper is a deviation from the 
normal, incapable of assimilation through ordinary 
economic motives and social forces; presenting a dis- 



4 PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 

tinct social problem, as do the criminal, the inebriate, 
the prostitute, the monopolist, and the revolutionist. 

Psychologically, pauperism is poverty plus a mental 
attitude in which are mingled discouragement, lack 
of ambition and imagination, thriftlessness, irresponsi- 
bility, passive resignation to a parasitic relation to 
society. Vagrancy, the technical offense of living with- 
out regular employment when not having other visible 
means of support, and mendicancy, the soliciting of 
alms from passers-by, are the more active expressions 
of pauperism, of which the ordinary, superficial test is 
simply the necessity for some form of permanent relief 
because of fault, deficiency, or weakness of character. 

Pauperism must be clearly differentiated from pov- 
erty — the larger and more important problem — which 
presents many aspects that may be wholly unfamiliar 
to those who know only pauperism. Some of those 
aspects face towards economic reform; others towards 
health, housing, or the administration of justice. 

In recent years there are two clearly distinguishable, 
often antagonistic views of poverty, one of which we 
may call, broadly speaking, the economic, and the other 
the biologic. According to the first view the differences 
among men are due mainly to their environment, their 
training and opportunities; according to the other, 
mainly to their inherent nature, their biologic inheri- 
tance, their protoplasm. True, biology concerns itself 
also with environmental influence, and economics recog- 
nizes unalterable differences in human beings; but there 
is justification for the distinction, if not pressed too far, 
in that the main preoccupation of economics is with the 
wants and activities of men in society, with their actual 



PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 5 

behavior in view of the rewards obtainable for given 
efforts; while that of biology is with generation, re- 
production, and the development of characteristics 
derived from ancestors. 

Both views are indispensable and they can be recon- 
ciled. By economic, sanitary and social reforms, public 
hygiene and social insurance, effective organization of 
charity and the development of educational measures, 
economic poverty can be reduced in amount and the 
distinct hygienic problem of pauperism can be isolated. 
This residual problem is largely one of mental defect, 
calling for segregation and humane treatment of indi- 
viduals and the gradual elimination of defective strains; 
but it involves also far-reaching measures which affect 
pauperism incidentally and are to be advocated chiefly 
in the interests of those who are in no danger whatever 
of becoming paupers. 

The reconciliation or assimilation of the biologic and 
the economic view of poverty justifies its considera- 
tion in a scientific congress. If we think of pauperism 
as mental disease or mental defect, and of poverty which 
is not pauperism as an economic and social condition, 
the former to be eliminated or relieved by eugenic and 
sanitary measures acting on the individual, the latter 
to be eliminated or mitigated by economic progress and 
social reform, resulting in greater efficiency and more 
just relations, we are at least thinking in scientific terms* 
and relying upon remedies which science can examine 
and assess. 

This view of pauperism and poverty is in contrast 
both with the legal conception which underlies English 
and North American poor laws and with the religious 



6 PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 

conception which has more especially colored the charity 
of Catholic countries in Central and South America. 
The English law recognizes a legal right to relief. It 
creates an elaborate machinery for the administration 
of this poor relief. The almshouse* is its central feature. 
A hospital or infirmary, and in recent years a sanatorium 
for consumptives and other special institutions, supple- 
ment the almshouse proper, which is mainly for aged 
infirm or chronically disabled dependents. Outdoor 
relief, by which is meant assistance given to the poor 
in their own homes, is another recognized feature of 
poor relief in nearly all communities in which the tra- 
ditions and customs of the English poor law have been 
established. The fundamental idea of the English poor 
law is that the state is responsible for the relief of desti- 
tution and for the prevention of mendicancy and va- 
grancy; that whatever is required to maintain life and 
prevent actual suffering from hunger and exposure is 
to be done from funds raised by local taxation, except 
of course in so far as these needs are met by relatives, 
neighbors, relief societies, churches, trade unions, or 
other voluntary agencies. When other sources fail, 
in the last extremity, there is always the public relief 
official — overseer of the poor, as he is oftenest called — 
whose duty it is to relieve the distress. This is con- 
ceived to be one of the most elementary and imperative 
obligations of the state, to be discharged through some 
appropriate governmental agency. 

The religious conception of charity, as a means of 
spiritual edification to the giver, not unfamiliar in 

*Also called Poor House, Poor Farm, County Home, etc.; 
the equivalent of the English Workhouse. 



PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 7 

English-speaking countries, but more emphasized and 
exemplified in Latin America, involves a different con- 
ception both of charitable relief and of the destitution 
which charity is to relieve. Not the right to relief, 
but the privilege of giving, is its central feature. Not 
the prevention of begging and of vagrancy, but the 
prevention of indifference and hardness of heart, is its 
aim. " Our families/ 7 says a writer in the Buenos Aires 
General Census of 1910, "have been essentially charit- 
able at all times; the poor have never called at their 
doors in vain. Religious by tradition, inheritance and 
personal connection, our ancestors were imbued with 
such definite charitable principles that they never 
passed a poor person by." "This is the cause," adds 
the Argentine commentator, "of the existence of the 
legion of false beggars." 

The scientific view of poverty is that it is the result 
of maladjustments, biologic, economic, and social, but 
above all psychologic, i. e., the survival of instincts 
and motives suitable to an earlier and more primitive 
stage of existence, but out of place in the modern world, 
and especially in the conditions of life of the western 
hemisphere in our generation. The scientific view of 
pauperism is that it is one of the worst, the most ex- 
treme of these maladjustments, with no adequate de- 
fense or justification from the religious point of view, 
no adequate provision either for relief or for prevention 
in any system of poor law yet devised, yielding neither 
to such coercive measures as have been applied by the 
state nor to acts done under the charitable impulse, 
however self-sacrificing or heroic those actions may be. 

The bad tradition, inherited equally through church 



8 PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 

and state, is that poverty is a part of the natural order 
of things, to be constantly relieved by charity or by the 
poor law, but constantly repeated in each generation in 
order that charity may be kept alive and that the poor 
law may function. The new view, the natural view, as 
I venture to suggest, for North and South America, if 
by natural we mean that which corresponds to the con- 
ditions among which we live, is that poverty is not neces- 
sary or tolerable, that we may confidently look forward 
to a time when misery, squalor, a positive lack of the 
necessaries and ordinary decencies and comforts of life, 
shall be absolutely unknown among us; when a stand- 
ard of living sufficient for physical and moral well-being 
shall be possible for every class in society; when educa- 
tion, recreation, and leisure shall be within reach of all; 
when childhood shall be universally protected, the 
efficient working life prolonged, disease greatly di- 
minished and its financial burdens distributed through 
insurance, old age postponed and amply provided for, 
so that it does not mean economic distress. 

For the realization of such an ideal the whole course 
of events in the western world in modern times has been 
preparing. The enormous increase of capital, the in- 
vention and improvement of machinery, the expansion 
of the scale of production, the organization of industry, 
the division of labor, the development of transporta- 
tion, the widening of markets, the progress of science 
and of technical education, the increase of efficiency 
caused by higher standards of living and the conquest 
of disease, especially of the tropical diseases, the per- 
fection of administrative as well as of technical processes 
— an amazing series of revolutionary changes familiar 



PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 9 

to the whole world, but of greatest significance when 
they are brought to bear upon the undeveloped, the 
all but untouched, natural resources of our still sparsely 
populated continents of the west — make possible here 
a civilization without poverty, a manner of life in which 
self-respecting economic independence shall be as much 
a matter of course as political and civil liberty. 

This contrast between the old world and the new, 
between Europe and the Americas, was obvious before 
the devastating European war. It will be unhappily 
more obvious still in the years which immediately 
follow the destruction of resources for w T hich the war is 
responsible. In that destruction all the world suffers, 
but in the nature of things the countries at war suffer 
most, and even the highest technical efficiency is no 
substitute for the capital, the productive energy, and 
the raw materials which the war destroys. 

Our productive capacity, if it can be devoted to 
peaceful ends, our economic resources, if they can be 
applied to the legitimate wants of man, are ample for 
a civilization without poverty. We have only to apply 
the knowledge we already have, to take the trouble and 
meet the expense, in order to abolish poverty in the 
sense that means actual deprivation of the conditions 
essential to a rational, prosperous, and enlightened ex- 
istence for all those who on their part meet its essential 
individual conditions. The comprehensive means to 
this end lie beyond the scope of this paper. The pre- 
vention of pauperism is a part — a very specific and ex- 
ceptional part — of this larger task. The first and most 
strategic point of attack is in the treatment of the 
mentally defective. 



10 PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 

The report of the English Royal Commission on the 
Care and Control of the Feebleminded in 1908 sets 
forth conservatively and authoritatively the conclu- 
sions on which we may base a sound public policy : 

(1) That both on grounds of fact and of theory 
there is the highest degree of probability that feeble- 
mindedness is usually spontaneous in origin — that is, 
not due to influences acting on the parent — and tends 
strongly to be inherited; 

(2) That, especially in view of the evidence con- 
cerning fertility, the prevention of mentally defective 
persons from becoming parents would tend largely 
to diminish the number of such persons in the popu- 
lation; 

(3) That the evidence for these conclusions 
strongly supports measures, which on other grounds 
are of pressing importance, for placing mentally 
defective persons, men and women, who are living at 
large and uncontrolled, in institutions where they 
will be employed and detained; and in this, and in 
many other ways, kept under effectual supervision as 
long as may be necessary. 

Dr. Martin W. Barr, of Pennsylvania, writing in 
Charities four years earlier, referred to the modern in- 
stitutional care of the feeble-minded as the utilization 
of a waste product, a forcible illustration of one of the 
greatest culminations of the nineteenth century. The 
recognition of the possibilities and limitations of the 
mentally defective leads to the creation of a sphere for 
him in which, trained and encouraged in congenial 
occupations, he may attain to a certain degree of inde- 
pendence, and cease to be either a menace to society 
or a helpless burden. 



PAUPERISM : AN ANALYSIS 1 1 

It is not merely because of their biologic character 
that the mentally defective are unfit for parenthood. 
They are unfit guardians for children, being unable to 
give them moral or economic training. Their income, 
if earned through wages, is irregular and insufficient to 
support a stable home life. Poverty, intemperance, 
immorality, and neglect, even of the elementary physical 
needs of children, are the natural, almost the inevitable, 
characteristics of their homes. Unfit to maintain do- 
mestic life, the mentally subnormal are equally ill 
adapted to industrial life as organized in a regime of free 
competition. They cannot earn minimum wages and 
they clog the wheels even of the best organized and most 
enlightened industries. They need occupation, but 
under special supervision and protection. Their tasks 
should be carefully selected and suited to their capaci- 
ties, but need not, as is sometimes hastily inferred, be 
the dirtiest and most disagreeable. The recognition of 
the principle of guardianship from infancy; the segre- 
gation of retarded and backward children in the schools, 
in order that they may be studied individually, their 
physical defects discovered and remedied, and those 
who are definitely feeble-minded early identified and re- 
moved to appropriate institutions and colonies, except 
of course in those cases in which without undue expense 
or difficulty efficient care can be given at home; the 
removal of the feeble-minded from prisons and reforma- 
tories to these special institutions, legal punishment 
and reformation being obviously wholly inapplicable 
to them; and the creation in each state of a central 
authority — chiefly medical — comparable to our com- 
missions of lunacy, to have the oversight of all mentally 



12 PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 

defective, are the main features of a progressive policy 
for dealing with the chief cause of pauperism. 

Probably not more than fifteen per cent of the 
demonstrably feeble-minded in the United States are 
as yet segregated in special colonies or institutions 
suitable for their care. It is estimated that eighty-five 
per cent of the insane are treated in hospitals con- 
structed and maintained especially for them. If it were 
necessary to choose it is a question whether it would 
not be preferable to reverse these proportions, leaving 
the insane at large, in spite of their disease, and segre- 
gating the mentally defective whose minds cannot be 
cured but who can transmit their defect, with its train 
of pauperism, prostitution, criminality, and other 
grievous consequences. 

Alcoholism, although a recognized complication in 
mental instability and defect, deserves also separate 
consideration. It has been attacked as a vice, as a 
crime, as a habit, as a weakness, as a disease. It is 
all of these things, but here we are interested in it 
chiefly as a disease, furnishing a problem for mental 
hygiene and resulting in pauperism. The interna- 
tional list of causes of death recognizes alcoholism, acute 
and chronic, and from this specific disease as distinct 
from all organic diseases attributed to alcoholism, the 
United States census reports 3744 deaths in the registra- 
tion area in 1913, approximately one in 240 of all deaths 
— a number larger than the combined number of deaths 
from malaria, pellagra, rickets, lead poisoning, small- 
pox, anthrax, and rabies. Its importance however is 
of course but faintly indicated in mortality tables. As 
an obstacle to economic independence, as a cause of 



PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 13 

that unreliability and inefficiency which result in 
pauperism, it is probably surpassed only by inherited 
mental defect. In many parts of the world there has 
been organized a campaign against the manufacture and 
sale of alcoholic beverages, on the theory that the best 
way to affect the mind of the inebriate, present and 
prospective, is to withhold absolutely the means of 
feeding the appetite. This is a drastic, but certainly 
not an illogical, method. Just as we seek to extermin- 
ate the tuberculosis bacillus by spitting ordinances, 
and the malaria germ by warfare on the mosquito, both 
of which represent attacks on the external or exciting 
cause of the infection, rather than attempts to build 
up resisting power, so by removing completely the 
exciting external cause of alcoholism we may hope to 
stamp out that disease. There are some dissenting or 
at least doubting voices in each case. Perhaps im- 
munity or tolerance of an infection may be lost if for 
a generation or two the disease is kept at a distance 
through purely mechanical devices. So a prohibition 
era may be followed by greater destruction if alcohol 
comes back into use. The analogy seems to be war- 
ranted. Unless we are afraid of humanity's loss of 
immunity from the conquest of tuberculosis, we need 
not fear the loss of immunity from the conquest of 
strong drink. Nevertheless prohibition relies upon a 
material and coercive method, and if it should prove 
to be possible within a reasonable time to exterminate 
alcoholism on a spiritual basis, through genuine temper- 
ance (which certainly for all those in danger of al- 
coholism means abstinence) there are those who will 
prefer it and think no price too high to pay for such a 



14 PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 

conquest. A wise procedure would be to found local 
and national associations for the prevention of alco- 
holism, similar to those already enlisted in the world 
crusade against tuberculosis. The medical profes- 
sion, recognizing the weaknesses of some of its own 
members, but recognizing also its peculiar responsi- 
bility in all such hygienic campaigns, would naturally 
take the initiative, preventing rash mistakes and giving 
its unique support to sound measures. Alcoholism as 
a physical disease, as a mental affliction, would thus be 
subjected to the same painstaking scientific study, the 
same many-sided attack, that medical authorities and 
laymen have given cooperatively to tuberculosis and 
hook-worm, and are now beginning to give to venereal 
disease and to infant mortality. Out of such study and 
the sane experiments to which it would lead would come 
a program of social action, of mental and physical 
hygiene, directed towards the elimination of alcoholism. 

The drug habit and sexual immorality and excesses 
of all kinds contribute to the problem of pauperism. 
Certain diseases like malaria and pellagra and the hook- 
worm disease, which especially affect the spirit, under- 
mining energy, reducing efficiency, lowering the stand- 
ard of living, would likewise demand consideration in 
any complete discussion of pauperism. Indeed, sick- 
ness of any kind in wage-earners' families, unless its 
expense is amply covered by insurance, may lead to just 
that kind of discouragement and hopelessness of which 
the pauper spirit is bred. 

Even if the native stock is not degenerate and the 
original capacity entirely normal, the educational sys- 
tem may be so inefficient and so ill adapted to existing 



PAUPERISM : AN ANALYSIS 1 5 

conditions as to produce in effect a generation of 
paupers. Neither general nor technical education can 
make efficient workers from the mentally defective; 
but an inefficient and badly organized educational sys- 
tem can create a semblance of relative feebleness of 
mind and economic incapacity in what was originally 
the healthiest and most vigorous stock. 

Industrial exploitation is a contributing cause of 
pauperism, whether it take the form of excessively low 
wages, or a long working day, or a seven-day week, or 
the speeding process with its exhausting fatigue. So 
also are irregularity and uncertainty of employment, 
such as result even in periods of comparative pros- 
perity from the custom of keeping about any industrial 
establishment, on the bait of occasional casual labor, 
a larger number of laborers than is normally required 
to do the work of the industry. 

Revolutionary changes in industrial processes, throw- 
ing out of employment those who cannot readily adapt 
themselves to the new methods, are responsible for 
much of that pauperism which may be called a by-prod- 
uct of industry. Beneficial they may be to society, 
and at the same time disastrous to those individuals 
who cannot quickly adapt themselves to the new de- 
mands. 

Any economic institution which discourages thrift 
and self-dependence, such as slavery or peonage, de- 
velops a mental attitude which may remain to the 
third and fourth generation, after the system itself has 
been abolished. Oppressive forms of taxation and of 
land tenure have similar effects. Class legislation and 
uneven administration of justice in the courts, when 



16 PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 

long enough continued and when there is no adequate 
means of resistance or reform, may produce a pauper 
proletariat. 

Militarism, a feudal organization of society, and other 
rigid caste systems, however efficient they may appear 
externally, contain the germs of pauperism for the sub- 
ordinate classes, though these germs may first develop 
their baneful influences only after democracy has re- 
placed the social order in which they were planted. 
Probably the pauperism of backward communities in 
northern sections of the United States might be traced 
through genealogical studies to imported convicts of 
the colonial era, to inferior Irish immigration of the 
middle of the century, and to assisted criminal and 
pauper immigration from the continent of Europe in 
more recent years. Probably much of the criminality 
and inefficiency of large classes of southern Negroes is 
in effect high grade feeble-mindedness, which did not 
seriously interfere with the productivity of directed 
slave labor, but is revealed under the conditions of free 
competition. We may expect that natural eugenic 
influences, arising in the one case from more stable 
marriage and family institutions among the descendants 
of the slave population, and in the other from the freer 
mingling of urban, semi-urban, and rural populations 
made possible by modern methods of communication, 
will tend to eliminate these kinds of pauperism together 
with the mental inferiority to which it is due. 

Mental hygiene has its tasks with those who have the 
pauper spirit and with those who are in danger of ac- 
quiring it; but it has its tasks also with charitable givers, 
with public relief officials and with the citizens whose 



PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 17 

ideals the public relief policy of the state represents. 
Both official public relief and voluntary religious charity 
have been at bottom consciously or unconsciously 
pessimistic. They have assumed the continuance, if 
not the desirability, of a permanent class of dependent 
poor. The harsh, unsympathetic attitude of almshouse 
keepers, and the sentimental, spiritually selfish attitude 
of volunteer dole-givers, are both out of harmony with 
the pragmatic, humane view which challenges the very 
existence of pauperism, which hopes to put an end to 
the need for official poor relief and for voluntary charity 
alike. Organized charity is the embodiment in practice 
of this new view. It discountenances indiscriminate 
almsgiving and every other custom, however sancti- 
fied by tradition and sentiment, which encourages the 
pauper spirit. It demands accurate knowledge of the 
individual circumstances in each case of need as a basis 
for a plan of relief. It advocates inquiry and careful 
records and intelligent cooperation. It ministers to 
the strength and not to the weakness of those who are 
in trouble. It emphasizes family solidarity and family 
responsibility. It believes that the best occupation for 
a sick person is to get well, that an able-bodied married 
man should support his family, that mothers of young 
children should nurse and nurture their offspring, that 
all who are earning to their full capacity should save 
something for future emergencies, and that those who 
are in need of charitable assistance should receive aid 
which in kind and in amount is determined not by the 
accident as to whether a benevolent individual passes 
their way, or a relief agency is or is not in funds, or an 
institution has or has not been established to provide 



18 PAUPERISM: AN ANALYSIS 

for that need, but is determined, on the contrary, by a 
painstaking and discriminating study of the present 
situation and the previous experience of the individual 
or the family in question. It insists that diagnosis 
rather than charitable impulse should be the basis of 
every decision, though charitable impulses, thus guided 
and directed to wise action, are by all means to be en- 
couraged and strengthened. 

Doing different things for different persons, as 
organized charity demands, if they are to be in any 
high degree the right things, involves the training of 
professional social workers for relief societies, for the 
social service of hospitals and dispensaries, for the pro- 
bation and parole work of courts, and for many other 
kinds of work in which a technique and special litera- 
ture already exist. Such trained workers do not re- 
place volunteers, but increase their number and their 
efficiency. We might well hope that this discussion 
would give an impetus to the establishment in one or 
more of the capitals of South America of a School of 
Philanthropy for the training of social workers in all 
the gathered wisdom of the church, enriched and sup- 
plemented by the social sciences and their practical 
applications in all countries. 

We come then to the conclusion — 

That every rational economic reform, every step in 
the humanizing of industry, every means of preventing 
disease and of relieving the people of its financial bur- 
dens, every substitution of a reasonable adjustment for 
a social or economic maladjustment, will have a bene- 
ficial result in drying up the sources of pauperism; 

That the frontal attack upon pauperism lies in the 



PAUPERISM : AN ANALYSIS 1 9 

segregation and humane care of the feeble-minded, 
the prevention of alcoholism, and the development of 
social insurance against sickness; 

That to these ends the professional and technical 
training of sanitarians for the public health service, 
and the professional and technical training of social 
workers for the tasks of relief and prevention, are of 
paramount importance. 



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